venerdì 11 aprile 2014

San Francisco Hackfest!

Hi everyone!

It's been a while since I last blogged, and I should probably even stop pretending I will blog more, but anyway...
Today is the third day of the GNOME Hackfest here at the Endless Mobile offices, in the startup neighborhood of San Francisco, in the hearth of the Silicon Valley - where stuff happens in technology, and free software is no exception.

So, what I have been doing?
On Wednesday we started with defining the agenda for the three days, and my friends already blogged about that.
I had the chance to meet with Kristian and the unstoppable Jasper to discuss wayland's xdg_surface, state changes and resizing - and that will mean we will bring an end to all flickering you see everyday in x11 when you maximize or resize a window. Not to mention we sorted out transients (popovers and tooltips) in a world where the application does not know its absolute position.
We also all toghether discussed application sandboxes, as Lennart and Kay were here and they were kind to explain how kdbus helps in making future applications secure.

Thursday morning on the other hand was gjs. Jasper, Cosimo, Colin and I sat down and landed a lot of GC improvements that will bring more responsiveness and less memory usage to your JS applications (as well as your favorite desktop shell). We introduced background sweeping for certain large objects such as byte arrays and cairo surfaces, we fixed cairo_region and GParamSpec bindings and we made sure the GC runs often.
In the afternoon we had a presentation by our host, Endless Mobile. We were shown what they're doing, and saw a prototype of their product (a BayTrail based desktop PC with a very stylish sort of oval case). I believe what they're trying to achieve is amazing, because really the emerging markets have billions of potential customers in a place where Windows doesn't matter, and will be great for GNOME and Free Software in general if they succeed.
After that Jim Nelson from Yorba and Daniel Foré from Elementary joined us for a long session on helping application developers, ISVs and other communities to use our platform. We talked IDEs, tooling, documentation, in preparation for the Developer Experience hackfest in Berlin. I won't be in Berlin (unfortunately it's exam week at my university), but it's been interesting to listen anway.

Besides work, I took some time on Tuesday to visit the city of San Francisco, walking all along the bay coast, and even had a chance to visit the university of Stanford, down in Palo Alto.
And for all of that I'm having a wonderful time, and I'd like to thank the GNOME Foundation and all the contributors for sponsoring me to come here.

1 commento:

"to discuss wayland's xdg_surface, state changes and resizing - and that will mean we will bring an end to all flickering you see everyday in x11 when you maximize or resize a window"I was interested in that the past weeks. Can you point me to some documentation or something (why it happens, not the solution)? =)

I tough the only solution would be animate the maximize and minimize states. So I took a look at what elementary OS does for that in Gala, and I was planing to implement that for mutter. Seems that you can solve it differently.